Outside and above us, fair-weather cumulus clouds dapple the sky while the green leaves of summer sway in a honeysuckle breeze. Inside the basement pool, it's a different story.

Fluorescent lights over the ancient tank barely penetrate the chlorine-and-urine clouds frothed up by today's bladder-challenged day campers. My identical twin brother, John, and I perch on our lifeguard chairs, mouth-breathing through another shift. A month ago, the boss outlawed radios. The struggle to remain awake without Mungo Jerry has become Herculean.

Summertime down here in the dank dungeon? For all we residents of aquatic Dante-ville know, it's still the dead of winter.

Though John and I don't fully realize it yet, enslavement in the natatorium has carved the first grievous rut in our 21-year-old lives. In his famous First Law of Motion, Isaac Newton observed that bodies at rest tend to stay that way unless some other force intervenes to get them moving again. After months of accumulating pitiable lucre by day and draining our parents' bottomless liquor cabinet by night, the two of us now epitomize the "inert" in "inertia."

That evening, as usual, it's dark when our shift ends. Back home at surface level, we pour ourselves bourbon-and-Coke highballs and turn on our parents' Zenith. Whether by serendipity or providence, the first program that comes on is a science show on rat brains. Under normal circumstances, such fare would trigger automatic channel surfing.

Alas, the fates of these rodents transfix us: It's like watching ourselves in rat suits.

The science in a nutshell: Neurology researchers sort 36 rats into three environments. In the "impoverished" environment, single rats are sequestered in solitary confinement with neither peers nor toys to enliven their days. In the "standard" environment, groups of three rats each share a slightly larger cage but are given no toys, nor opportunities for exploration. Finally, in the "enriched" environment, a dozen rats live together in what is essentially rat Disneyland--a large cage and an ever-changing variety pack of wheels, mazes, ladders, and other toys.

After a month, all of the study subjects are "sacrificed" and their brains autopsied.

The Disneyland rats, it turns out, have much thicker brain cortexes, increased neuron size, and many more branching connections than those who dwelled in the "standard" environment. Then again, at least these "standard" rats still sport brains recognizable as normal. Not so the barren noggins of those wretches forced to wither away in antisocial, toyless isolation--i.e., the cohort with which John and I most closely identify.

"We have to do something with our lives," he says to me.

I barely have the energy to nod in agreement. I take another swig from my intoxicating Big Gulp and twitch my whiskers out of nervous reflex.

Go to the next page for how to beat mental stagnation...

John and I are certainly not the only guys to be waylaid in Rutville, that enervating psychic suburb located somewhere between Comfort Zone, Monotonopolis, and Hell. Scientists, for their part, prefer less metaphorical ways of defining this all-too-familiar human territory.

A study published in the International Journal of Aging & Human Development recently described ruts as "an over adaptation to our own routines and expectations, producing 'hyper habituation,' mental stagnation, and neophobic response orientations."

"We shouldn't make it sound too complicated," says psychologist Jay Lebow, Ph.D., a clinical professor at the Family Institute at Northwestern University. "Neophobic," for example, simply means getting the heebie-jeebies at the prospect of something new. "Change, for many people, is a real challenge. Most of us have a natural tendency to be conservative in our lives, to establish patterns and stick with them," he says.

Not that staying the course is necessarily pathological, provided you enjoy the path you're on. "It's only when your patterns of behavior become undesirable to you that a routine becomes a rut," says stress researcher Andy Morgan, M.D., an associate professor of psychiatry at Yale University.

Alas, it's not always easy to tell when you've crossed the thin line separating comfort from stultification. Ruts, says Dr. Morgan, are notorious for developing gradually. In mild cases, symptoms can take on such a background-noise quality that it's easy to stop paying attention to them: ever-so-faint ennui, reluctance to seek out novel experiences, vague cognitive staleness, and a transient overidentification with slowly boiling frogs.

If, on the other hand, your rut becomes too entrenched and soul sapping, you can fall prey to "Is that all there is?" nihilism. And this, say the experts, can take you places you don't want to go.

Even men who elude the worst of such clinical fates can't escape a rut's indirect pitfalls, namely the missed opportunities to forge a stronger spirit. Like overly cautious investors who watch their savings lose ground to inflation, rut-stuck men who opt to avoid all risk squander their best chances for personal growth.

And this will surely come back to haunt them, given the uncertainties that abound in even the most carefully controlled existence. "The fact is that unpredictable events occur in all our lives," says Frank Farley, Ph.D., a psychologist at Temple University and former president of the American Psychological Association.

"Some people are devastated when unexpected and stressful things happen. On the other hand, if you practice letting go now and then, if you periodically test and challenge yourself, you will become a stronger person because of it. When the next uncertainty comes along, you'll be much more capable of handling it."

Go to the next page for the start of an epic trip...

The morning after our lesson in rat neurology, John and I quit our jobs, gas up the Chevy Nova, and begin a nonstop drive from Pittsburgh to the Jersey shore. Over the next 6 weeks, we plan to bop our way down the Atlantic coast, beach by beach, to the Florida Keys. Our only goals for this rut-busting summer road trip are to bodysurf a lot and to develop a tolerance for the unknown, something our carefully circumscribed lives to date have sorely lacked.

To save money, we've decided to give up alcohol; do laundry by swimming with our clothes on in the ocean; negotiate deals on restaurant food that's reached the cusp of staleness; and try to convince girls we meet en route to let us sleep for free at their apartments.

This last part will surely pose the greatest challenge. The two of us aren't exactly what could be described as "lover boys," nor even "regular guys," for that matter.

To rally courage for babe accosting, my brother relates a story about therapist Albert Ellis, a pioneer of cognitive behavioral therapy.

"Ellis believed the best way to extinguish a fear was to face it head-on," John says as the Nova shudders along the Pennsylvania Turnpike. "When he was young, his shyness with women bothered him greatly, so he came up with an exercise to overcome it. He went to a park in New York City and forced himself to ask women out, over and over again, till his fear of rejection dissipated."

Some 130 women later, or so the anecdote goes, Ellis emerged from the park, cured of shyness. He even got a couple of dates out of the whole business, though this was not the main purpose of the experiment.

When we finally reach the Atlantic City boardwalk late that afternoon, John and I try the approach ourselves. My own most memorable attempt is with an impossibly minxish tart who is chewing pink saltwater taffy and wearing unzipped jeans over a lime green bikini bottom.

Me: "[stuttering nonsense barely recognizable as human speech]?"

Her: "No."

By 1 a.m., we're decidedly less shy. We're also exhausted and still homeless. The women on the boardwalk at this hour have hollow eyes and a certain professional quality about them. We give up the dream of indoor accommodations and drag our sleeping bags to the beach, ignoring signs that outlaw camping here.

The next thing I know, a raucous mechanical roar jars me to consciousness. It's the next morning, and a thick bank of sea fog has rolled in overnight. I can hardly see my brother 6 feet away. The machine noise grows louder, and all of a sudden, a yellow monstrosity materializes: a voracious killdozer that's swallowing the beach one chunk at a time. Its mechanical baleen filters out beer cans, candy wrappers, cigarette butts, and the like, then spits back clean sand.

I can't see the contraption's driver in this fog. I'm sure he can't see us.

"Wake up!" I yell over at John.

The two of us manage to stumble out of harm's way seconds before ingestion. Afterward, it takes nearly an hour for our hearts to stop hammering. Still, there's no denying that this near miss with trash compaction is a little exhilarating.

Though I'm unaware of this factoid at the time, researchers have determined that the exact same soup of hormones and brain chemicals that triggers anxiety in the timid stirs excitement in the bold: a classic eye-of-the-beholder perceptual phenomenon you can train yourself to feel.

"That was kind of cool," John says, snarfing down a 99-cent breakfast special.

"Yeah," I agree, savoring both the meal and the residual adrenaline, the latter for the first time in my life. "Whatever doesn't destroy us, eh?"

John nods. When the waitress hands over the check, he asks if we can crash at her place for a few days.

"No," she says, which gives us a good reason to economize on the tip.

Go on to the next page to find out if you're a "type T" or a "type t"...

Despite all the compelling incentives to do so, extricating yourself from a rut is rarely easy. For many men, the complacency and trepidation mix together like the dual ingredients in epoxy. The longer you allow the resultant mucilage to set, the harder it gets to break free.

"Some people," says Farley, "won't even try to change their lives until things become so aversive that they finally have to do something."

Call this the negative inspiration for rut busting, a flight from the insufferable that clearly motivated John and me to get off our own sessile buttocks. Fortunately, the experts add, most men can summon a more positive inspiration, as well: our innate itch for adventure. "Just as there is a natural tendency to keep things the same," explains Lebow, "it's also a strong part of human nature to seek novelty."

Individuals vary greatly in terms of how strong these opposing tendencies are, according to Farley. He has spent decades researching the differences between the "type T" (for thrill-seeking) daredevils and "type t" (note the lowercase) milquetoasts.

The former psychic bin includes world-class adventurers, from Mt. Everest summiteers to parachuting BASE jumpers (an acronym for the buildings, antennae, spans, and earth formations that serve as these jumpers' favorite launchpads). Type T's, says Farley, can't abide life as usual, opting instead to constantly push the envelope. They may be at risk of falling into glaciers, but rarely ruts.

Type t's, on the other hand, prefer prudent, predictable, skittishly unspectacular lives. These highly risk-averse guys feel most comfortable when buttressed by the familiar. As one old chestnut puts it, "Ships are safe in the harbor, but that's not what ships are for." The most diehard type t's don't even stay in the harbor. They've consigned themselves to dry dock.

It doesn't have to be this way. "Most men are neither Superman nor Clark Kent," says Farley, "but rather fall somewhere in between the extremes." And though it's true that nothing short of a brain transplant is likely to suddenly transform Woody Allen into Evel Knievel, the potential for some degree of transformative growth lies within us all, just waiting to be tapped.

"Most every man has an idea of something exciting he'd like to try," says psychologist Gary Hazlett, Psy.D., a retired major in the U.S. Army who has researched ways of instilling a sense of mastery and self-confidence in special-ops forces. "Perhaps it's hiking up Grandfather Mountain here in North Carolina, or going skydiving, or even signing up for a cooking class and developing a new talent. The important thing is to pick something that encourages you to venture a little outside your comfort zone."

The emphasis here is on "a little." There's no need to sell your condo and hightail it to the Bitterroots in order to join a pack of wolves. "If anything," says Farley, "I worry about men who try to break out of a life rut with an ill-conceived big change. It's like jumping into the deep end without testing the waters first. My advice: Try the smaller things first to find out what works for you."

You may be surprised to find how far baby steps in the right direction can take you. As Marcus Aurelius once put it, "Be satisfied with success in even the smallest matter, and think that even such a result is no trifle."

Increasingly, modern-day researchers are finding that such advice from antiquity is more than just feel-good philosophy. Indeed, any meaningful detour off the beaten track can serve as the first domino in a large-scale life makeover.

"By successfully making a modest change," says Dr. Morgan, "you're shifting your mindset away from a world of limits to a world of possibilities. It's a profound difference. Instead of sitting around wondering what you might be able to do, you're teaching yourself that you can set almost any goal and, with the right work, achieve it."

Go on the next page...

John and I are standing in the shadow of the Swamp Fox roller coaster, chatting up two Southern belles at a Myrtle Beach amusement park. Amazingly, we've become quasi-adept at our sales pitch. For every three beaches and two cow pastures we've been forced to sleep on, we now enjoy at least one girlish living-room floor.

It probably helps that our bodies have become deeply tanned after 3 weeks in the sun and salt, and that our freak-flag hair is the color of August grass turning to straw. Thanks to the high price of beach food combined with many hours spent each day bodysurfing, our onetime veneers of cadaverous flab have melted away.

We're like twin Poindexters morphing ever so slowly into golden boys, at least in our own minds. Whether that's valid or not, we're learning firsthand that male self-confidence -- even when delusional -- has definite appeal to women.

The giggling roommates smile at us in a way that has come to prefigure a free night's stay. The blonde can't keep her eyes off John, and the redhead keeps calling me "Jimmy" in her charming drawl. I'm happier than I've been in years when, without warning, my legs catch on fire.

When the fire climbs to within 3 inches of my scrotum, I know I have no choice. Despite a gathering throng of gawkers, I tear off my jeans and jockey shorts and stand bottomless in the setting sun.

It's John who finally realizes what's happening. He hoists me up by my torso and carries me 10 feet away from the clay mound I've been standing on. Ferociously, he swats at my exposed flesh, brushing hundreds of fire ants off my legs and groin.

When the last of the ants is finally off my body, John shakes the stragglers out of my underwear and pants. He helps me dress, then makes me swallow a couple of Benadryl from our first-aid kit.

The girls are sympathetic. When they invite us to spend the night on their floor, I wonder in my quasi-delirium if this forced de-pantsing has somehow intrigued them.

Go on to the next page...

"There's a term we use in special-forces training: 'stress inoculation,' " says Hazlett, "and it's a great way to build a guy into a more stress-resilient, hardier individual."

The good news, he adds, is that the same "crawl, walk, run" model capable of transforming clueless, unsure recruits into supremely self-confident soldiers can work for almost any man willing to put the process to work. The keys are to be realistic, patient, and willing to approach your ultimate goal in a step-by-step fashion.

The first step, often downplayed in the rush to get started, is to learn the basic skills required. No matter what challenge you decide to take on--from bonefishing in the Gulf to paragliding off the Oregon coast--proper training will help you form the muscle memory, cognitive savvy, and emotional wherewithal you'll need to succeed. Some highly technical activities, such as spelunking and wreck diving, absolutely require certification. No one in his right mind is likely to rent you the requisite equipment without it.

But even seemingly obvious pursuits like hiking often require specialized skills and knowledge. It's true that walking comes naturally to us. Hiking a 200-mile stretch of the Appalachian Trail, however, is much more than just walking. From traversing uneven terrain without lower-back pain to avoiding snakebites, poisonous plants, and beaver fever, training can make a huge difference between the trip of a lifetime and a bivouac in bucolic misery.

Magazines, books, and the Internet, to be sure, offer a wealth of specialized advice for do-it-yourselfers on everything from step-by-step marathon training to building the world's greatest backyard koi pond. An even better option, however, is to use such sources as supplements and find an experienced mentor who'll show you the ropes in person.

From guided ecotourism and outdoor outfitters to masters sports and adventure tours, opportunities abound to sign up for a positive, civilian equivalent of the boot-camp experience. The best teachers know how to provide support and encouragement throughout the learning curve.

Having other rookies around to share the experience can also prove helpful. Not everyone, to be sure, thrives in a group environment. But if you're a relatively social guy, feeling you're part of a band of brothers can provide a great sense of support and inspiration to try your hardest.

Once you begin to learn new skills, the next step is to take a test that reveals your developing mastery. It's critical, says Hazlett, that this test be difficult but achievable. If it's too easy, you won't feel any sense of accomplishment. If it's impossibly difficult, you'll only reinforce a sense of failure, creating a powerful incentive to return, posthaste, to the comfort of your rut.

A man whose long-range goal is to run a marathon, for instance, shouldn't attempt a half-marathon 1 month into his training. A much more realistic benchmark might be a local 5-K "fun run." What you want, says Hazlett, is a taste, not an engorgement, of meaningful success.

As important as it is to learn specific new skills, what's arguably even more important is changing your psychological focus. "Experiencing success, no matter how small, breeds self-confidence," says Hazlett. "Men start to realize, 'Hey, I can do more than I thought I could.' "

The next step is to give yourself a little time to rest up, consolidate what you've learned, and celebrate your progress so far. The military tends to do this with medals and award ceremonies; the civilian world, increasingly, with certificates, trophies, and the like. Just don't rest too long on your laurels. When you start feeling comfortable and cocky again, it's time to repeat the whole process with a new and progressively more challenging skill set.

Men who are consistently encouraged to go a little beyond what they think they're capable of will typically see both their competence and their confidence spiral up in tandem. "By the end of the training course," says Hazlett, "men start to realize that there may be no limit to what they can do."

Go to the next page to learn if our reporter goes beyond his limits...

The conch shell lies at the bottom of a deep and narrow hole 45 feet beneath the ocean's surface. John, who is the first to spot the specimen, uses hand signals to point it out to me. It's easily the largest shell either of us has seen outside of a museum. Surely, legions of earlier divers have seen it, too--and have been tempted to grab it as a souvenir. Just as surely, they've opted not to, given its treacherous location.

We've been diving for nearly an hour now. Early this morning, a Key Largo dive-shop owner rented us scuba gear and a small boat. Today's descent is by far the deepest that we've ever ventured. It's also our first time diving in salt water.

We were certified in scuba back in Pittsburgh, where the majority of our education took place in an indoor pool whose deep end measured 8 feet. For our final exam, our dive master had us descend 18 feet into the murk of a local Amish mud hole.

We shivered down there for a half hour, executing a variety of survival maneuvers, including everything from buddy breathing to purging a flooded regulator. The most dangerous fauna that we faced in Pennsylvania farm country were a few oversexed carp and some bovine fecal bacteria.

The water in today's reef, by contrast, is so gin-clear we can count the teeth of three great barracuda that smile at us like overly solicitous waiters. After a period of incident-free diving, I'm reasonably sure these 7-footers don't intend to eat us, at least not whole.

The dive-shop operator did, however, advise we remove anything flashy--watches, jewelry, and the like--from our persons, as shiny objects, he said, can sometimes be mistaken by these normally harmless brutes for snack fish. He recounted how one local construction worker repairing the causeway lost his hand in a single bite after sticking a silvery wrench into the water.

I'll admit, it's not my hands I'm worried about. Only a gossamer-thin pair of nylon swim trunks separates my favorite body part from ichthyological catastrophe. With apologies to poet Emily Dickinson, I'm feeling more than a tincture of "zero at the boner" right now.

A huge ray flaps by, providing a distraction from my disquietude. John and I chase after it, taking care to avoid its whip tail, just in case. As the recent experience with fire ants taught me, "three hundred times stung, twice shy."

We pursue the ray through canyons of coral, past schools of snappers and damselfish. It quickly outdistances us, and we stop to ogle a quartet of parrot fish hovering beside a staghorn coral. But none of it holds us, and soon we find ourselves back at the conch shell.

The cylindrical hole that holds it is the diameter of an industrial drum and 7 feet deep. The inner walls are home to dozens of sea urchins whose 6-inch spines, venomous and detachable, jut out at every imaginable angle. Who knows what unseen armies of lobsters and moray eels further guard the treasure?

All I know is that I have a sudden impulse to retrieve it, which is as mysterious to me as it is irrepressible.

When John and I left Pittsburgh nearly 6 weeks ago, we were much closer to the "type t" end of the personality spectrum than to the "type T." There are some men who seem born to court peril and thrive; not so the nervous, rigid likes of the Thornton-twin genotype. For guys like us, adventure is absolutely an acquired taste. But acquire it we have.

Between beach-eating machinery and beautiful girls, incendiary insects and the suicidal surf produced by one smallish hurricane, the trials and triumphs of this amazing summer have taught us the difference between living and living.

When I signal my intention to John, he flashes a thumbs-up. I point myself head-down at the hole's entrance, streamline my body as close as possible into a pencil shape, and exhale. Ever so slowly, my body slides downward on a vertical course inside the cylinder.

When my outstretched fingertips reach the conch shell, it occurs to me that wedging myself in here was the easy part. Getting back out looks to be a different story. A sudden wave of claustrophobia hits, and I fight the urge to go berserk. There's no room down here to somersault; the only way out is to repeat my entrance in reverse.

Forcing myself to calm down, I inhale as deeply as possible, inflating my lungs enough, I hope, to float me back out. There's a short, disconcerting lag during which nothing happens. I've neglected to factor in the weight of this huge shell.

But then, ever so slowly, my body budges and begins to rise. When the pointed tips of my fins emerge from the hole, John grabs on and gives a gentle upward tug, accelerating my extrication. I manage to hold on to both the conch and the vertical streamline and escape the gauntlet of spines unstabbed.

I show my brother the treasure we've just salvaged. In this moment, this shell seems to me the perfect symbol of every miraculous thing life offers to those who strive.

Our tanks now are nearly out of air. Through our face masks, John and I hold a brief eye conversation before nodding in agreement. Then, holding the shell between us, we center it above its former home and, on the count of three, let go.

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